Practice Notes & Schedule // Week of 1.19.26
On divination: engaging the oracle, elevating the elemental
Divination abounds and always has. We gaze towards the heavens, study wrinkles on our palms, study the movements and groupings of birds, scrutinize tea leaves, and on and on. At times other than our own, there has been more cultural gravity given to these practices of sensitive cross-dimensional perception; the Oracle of Delphi’s proclamations famously shaped the political and spiritual spheres of Greek life for centuries. Though the divinatory hasn’t fallen completely to the New Agers — the Catholic Church still trades in interpreting “miraculous” happenings: a consecrated host that appeared in Vilakkannur, India in 2013 was formally recognized as the most recent Eucharistic miracle in May of 2025. Outside of the explicitly spiritual arena, divination and market prediction (or gambling) share a promise of allowing one to master their individual context and circumstance through mastery of perspective. If you can scry the pattern, you can align your actions and mentality to benefit from the vicissitudes of circumstance. Choosing some aspect of apparent reality that seems beyond our influence, we apply our full consciousness (/intelligence) to it, anticipating and invoking the blooming of meaning from attention alone.
Here we are, already back to last week’s musing on Yoga Sutra 1.40 and the desirability of mastering the atomic as well as the vast, but that’s how it goes, one thing turning into another! In any case, I am no exception, often consulting the I Ching. As a sort-of New Year’s Resolution I’ve been engaging in weekly readings. I like to think of this practice as a journey towards a deeper relationship with the text and its history as well as a way to reveal some poetics of the thought-to-action relationship on a personal level.
Tossing the coins is a reminder of our enmeshment with nature, each consultation triggering an unfurling of elemental collisions. Fire, earth, lake, heaven, water, mountain, thunder, wind/wood swirl together between my palms, flipping and spinning onto the table to fall and reveal my position and path ahead. Each reading involves at least one hexagram, stacking two of these elements together in various combinations. More often than not, a single consultation yields two hexagrams, showing the trajectory of one’s inquiry shifting based on the oracle’s revelation of energetic dynamics within each line. A young yin or yang line holds its form, but old energy is due for a transformation. The emphasis of the oracle is in it’s name— I Ching translates to “Book of Changes.” To understand the oracle’s response it is essential to engage with not just one instant, but the span of time itself. You have to get comfy with the rise and fall of all things, including your own fortunes.
That the I Ching finds its human interrogator through and within the context of environmental and temporal conditions an is incredibly compelling to me. If the inquiry I come to the oracle with rests on some relational trouble with an other, the oracle responds with invocations of things on a much grander scale: earthquakes, storms, blazes, avalanches. Perspective and guidance for any bit of small personal business is there, but with its emphasis on change and transformation on a geological level, the I Ching reminds all comers that we’re in the flow of ALL. The goal of the consultation transforms from solving the riddle of personal trifles into joining in with the force of being, the oracle offering clues on how to remain centered on the potter’s wheel of life. Steady as part of a whole, always transforming. At least that’s the idea.
A full appreciation of divinatory practice takes time and personal engagement - Wednesday’s Zoom practices are part of my own attempt, so if you’re curious, consider joining us this week, 5:30pm PT. Freely offered! We’ll be working with this week’s reading: Hexagram 21 (Biting Through / fire over water) and Hexagram 51 (Storm / thunder over thunder). Expect plumbing of abstract and direct correlations and correspondences, hope to find something resonant!
This week’s photo taken at the recent exhibition of viewing stones at the Huntington Library & Gardens.
Tuning in:
Read: Took in Joy Williams’ 2000 novel The Quick & The Dead for the first time and then just started again immediately. Focused on one summer in the life of 3 teenaged girls, the book takes on grief, concerns of ecological collapse, how to get rid of ghosts, first loves, and the moral wilderness of modern America with Williams’ signature wryly cosmic observation of the absurdity of our human condition.
Los Angeles: Book Club’s next chapter is a TV show 🌀 Watch docuseries Breath of Fire with us! We meet on 2.7 to screen the final episode and talk about the whole wild Kundalini scene.
This week’s practice:
Monday, 7pm, Candlelight Flow // Highland Park Yoga
Tuesday, 8am, All Levels Yoga // Crescent Yoga ($10 community drop-in rate)
Wednesday, 8am, Yoga Level 2 // Highland Park Yoga
Wednesday, 5:30pm, Community Practice // Zoom (I Ching moves us again this week: 21 xform to 51)
Friday, 9am, Meditation Meet-Up 🌸 (reach out for details)
Friday, 4:30pm, All Levels Yoga Flow // Highland Park Yoga
Saturday, 8am, All Levels Yoga // Highland Park Yoga
Sunday, 9:30am, Yoga & Meditation // Highland Park Yoga
Retreat w/me & friends:
Malta Writing Retreat // MAY 2026 // in partnership with Neal Allen
Liberation for all beings!
Reach out to be my guest in-studio!
x Julia